


It's A Leap Of Faith (And A Little More)

by Starculler



Series: (Dis)placed [2]
Category: The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types, Young Justice (Cartoon)
Genre: Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Blood and Gore, Dick Grayson is a Talon, Found Family Slowburn, Gen, Implied/Referenced Brainwashing, Past Torture, Slow recovery, Violence, labeled Mature for violence blood and swearing
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-20
Updated: 2020-08-20
Packaged: 2021-03-06 19:40:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,465
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26004334
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Starculler/pseuds/Starculler
Summary: The kid's too small, too thin, with sallow skin, black veins, and the creepiest, piercing yellow eyes when Clint find him down in the supposedly abandoned HYDRA compound, so he does what a hero's supposed to. He helps. And then he regrets it. Hard.
Relationships: Clint Barton & Dick Grayson
Series: (Dis)placed [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1106442
Comments: 19
Kudos: 136





	It's A Leap Of Faith (And A Little More)

**Author's Note:**

> Hello hello hello! It's two months short of the 1-year anniversary of part 1's end and I come to you again with this morsel to kick of part 2! Everyone's support previously was absolutely flooring, and I really hope you guys'll enjoy this just as much!
> 
> Clint's pov is an absolute joy to write, even if I'm still trying to figure it out. Please enjoy and (if you want) let me know what you think!
> 
> Brief recap: This chapter specifically coincides with Part 1's chapters 4 and 5 where Dick is rescued from the HYDRA base (losing time at the end of chapter 4) and gets taken to Avenger's Tower where the realization finally hits that he's free.

Clint’s face throbbed, a dull ache centered on his broken nose that pushed up into his eyes and down into clenched jaw. He knocked another arrow regardless of the pain, aimed, and loosed it at his target. It _thwacked_ mutely into the shoulder, sunk deep in the gap between the enemy’s helmet and armor, less than inch from the lethal point of their throat. He didn’t wait for them to fall before he was onto the next in a long line of armed guards flooding the HYDRA lab’s wide corridor.

As often as he could he cast his eyes around the sea of tinted-visors and body armor to check on the kid — _the monster_ , his mind supplied but he beat the thought back until it was little more than a smothered ember simmering in the background of his thoughts. If Clint was a crack in the dam’s wall, then the kid was an explosion. The few glimpses he managed between moving and loosing arrows revealed a level of carnage that would have turned his stomach in any other situation. HYDRA’s soldiers fell like kindling to a fire. 

The moment he’d set his eyes on the line of guns in front of them, Clint had been ready to die to protect the child he’d found. Even if he would have only been able to buy the kid a few spare seconds, he would have done his best. Never in a million years would he have expected … _this._ The kid — tiny, obviously underfed, with long, wild black hair caught in noticeable knots — tore through the enemy’s ranks like they were paper. He used every inch of him to fight. To kill. Clint had watched, stomach churning, as the kid had knocked the helmets off of at least two men and all but torn out their throats with his teeth.

Even a bullet to his stomach hadn’t been enough to slow the kid down. If anything, it had kicked him into a frenzy that Clint wished he’d never borne witness to. He was sure he’d be seeing red on white in his nightmares for at least the next month. 

He suppressed a shudder, turning his face from the kid’s current target, and knocked another arrow with a growl. HYDRA were the monsters here, he reminded himself as his most recent target fell. Not the kid. Whatever they’d done to turn a child into _that_ , well, it wasn’t something he really wanted to think about. Not yet. Instead, he focused on the mission and on the enemies still blocking the way forward until there was no one left. 

Thirty-five bodies lay cooling on the ground by the end of it, and only fifteen had fallen to Clint’s efforts. He stood in the aftermath of the fight — the massacre — breathing heavy through his mouth, face still throbbing, and doing his best to stamp down on the wave of nausea that had hit him at the sight not six feet from him. He was glad, then, that the blaring alarms had shut off sometime early in the fight because he wasn’t sure he could have handled that on top of everything else.

The kid, for all the death he’d dealt, hadn’t so much as gasped. He stood in the middle of it all with blood dripping from his hands, pooling at his feet, matting his hair, and soaking his torn bodysuit. He was hunched slightly, loose in a way that felt predatory rather than tired, and when he looked up, Clint paled. The kid’s hair slid wetly away from his face leaving thick, wet, red trails behind on his nose, cheeks, and forehead. His lips and teeth were smeared, stained, with gore left behind from whichever victim’s throat he’d last bitten. 

Clint had expected to find fear written all over the kid’s face. Remorse. Anything and everything except for the sickening reality: Nothing. Nothing but the blank, almost peaceful mask his striking features cut into his pale, sallow face. Even his golden eyes were dull, pupils blown wide enough to nearly obscure the otherwise bold color. Bored until they locked onto him. Then. Then there was life. Movement. The kid darted forward without any regard for the bodies underfoot with a snarl, lips pulled back and baring bloody teeth, almost faster than Clint could think to protect himself.

The kid went straight for his throat, fingers hooked like talons as he leapt the last few inches between them and knocked forcefully into Clint. It was only Clint’s last minute block, arms flying up like he was a boxer forced on the defensive, that saved him from the mess of desperate clawing and snapping teeth, though it only barely held up when his back hit the floor. They struggled there, a scuffling, ruthless mess of limbs — the kid trying to tear him to pieces while Clint tried to push him off and pin him down. 

His comm crackled to life in his ear, familiar voices filtering through but going ultimately unheard as the kid rammed his elbow into his stomach. Clint groaned, grit his teeth, and managed to get a knee into the kid’s stomach. 

“Stop!” He yelled, more air than sound. “Fuck. Fucki— Stop!”

One of the kid’s hands brushed his throat, nails catching on his skin. Clint kicked out with a roar, hard enough to shove the kid off and send him tumbling across the floor. He rolled up onto his feet with a hiss, ribs twinging on his left side and his neck and right arm burning where the kid’s nails had shredded through like he was made of little more than tissue paper. 

“I don’t want to hurt you.” His voice was steel in the silence, eyes narrowed as he watched the kid pick himself up. “You don’t need to—

“Shit,” he cursed when the kid dove at him again. He managed to dodge twice before he was on the ground again. “You— Fuck. Fuck!” 

He tried to bite back on a scream when the kid’s teeth sank into his forearm, tearing through muscle as blood oozed past his lips. Clint pushed at the kid’s face, fingers tangling in his wet, matted hair. It did little to deter the little monster, fingers reaching for Clint’s neck again regardless of how much pain it might have caused him. They found purchase in his shirt soon enough and the kid used it to haul himself forward, Clint’s arm in his mouth the only real barrier between them.

Clint’s head buzzed with static white noise. His own blood dripped onto his face from above him. Fingers clawed at his neck. A single image played itself on look in front of his eyes: the HYDRA guard, one of many others he hadn’t seen, with the kid’s teeth in his throat, fingers digging and pushing and worming their way into the man’s eyes and— 

And he’d never been lucky. Not a day in his life except maybe the day he’d met Natasha because at least that had worked out in the long run, even if he hadn’t felt it would at the time. Bad luck clung to Clint like fire did a wooden house: spectacularly stubborn and violent. He’d never quite gotten around to wishing things were different until the moment he realized he was going to die at the hands of a child. 

The kid bit harder, nails slotting into the ragged tears they’d left behind the first time, and this time Clint couldn’t hold back the scream that bubbled up in his throat. He jerked, back arching off the ground in a vain attempt to buck his attacker off of him. Felt the kid’s fingers push and dig through skin and muscle and blood, and for a moment it didn’t matter. It didn’t matter than this was a kid. It didn’t matter that he was unlucky. It didn’t matter that not thirty minutes ago he’d been ready to die for him.

He gasped and pushed. Past the pain. Past sense. Past everything as instinct kicked in and the need to live, to survive, overwhelmed him. He yelled, adrenaline thrumming through his veins as he shoved and kicked and when that didn’t work he closed his hand into a fist and punched the kid’s face, not unlike he’d done when Clint had unhooked him from all that equipment back in the lab. Once. Twice. Three times before the kid finally fell, limp and jaw slack around the steadily bleeding wound in his other arm. 

Clint’s head cracked against the tile as he let himself lean back and breathe. His whole body ached, a mixture of pain and the sudden release of tension now that the danger had passed. He closed his eyes and inhaled. 

The world rushed back into focus in the red-tinted darkness behind his eyelids, almost overwhelming in its sudden intensity. The smell of death: the copper tang of blood and a putrid mix of piss and shit. The sour smell of his own sweat and blood. The ringing in his ears drowning out the still silence in the corridor and the crackling, muffled voices over the comm. The kid’s even, shallow breathing and the minute rise and fall of his chest against Clint’s purposefully deeper breaths — his stomach clenched and he forced himself to believe it was relief he felt for not having killed a child. The sticky wet mess of warm, oozing blood on him and the drier, congealing patches on the kid — a stark contrast to the cool, slick tile underneath him.

Clint exhaled and opened his eyes, wincing at the bright fluorescent lights buzzing overhead. He reached slowly up with his unbitten hand towards his ear, and had to pretend that the sight of his split skin and bloody knuckles didn’t make him sick. The kid’s alive, he reminded himself but it eased neither the guilt nor fear writhing and squirming behind his sore ribs. He pressed on the comm piece until it clicked, cutting off the static mess of garbled voices.

“I think my comm broke.” He sighed, wincing when his chest twinged with pain. “Got in a fight. Could use some. Some help.” He pulled his finger off the button for a moment before clicking it on once more to add, “s’pretty bad. Lots of dead guys. Just saying.” 

He groaned when he finally let his arm fall back to the floor. His eyes drooped, stinging as exhaustion washed over him. He really hoped the lack of alarms meant his team had taken them and the rest of HYDRA’s agents out. He didn’t think he had the energy for another fight, let alone enough to help him stand. 

“Fuck this place,” he murmured. “Fuck HYDRA for building it.” Speaking hurt, but he couldn’t bear the silence and anything was better at that point than lingering on the points of pain in his body or the … stench flooding his nostrils. “Fuck ‘em for whatever the hell they did to you. A little, underfed thing like you shouldn’t be able to be that strong.” He huffed out a small, self-deprecating laugh and hissed at the stitch of pain it pulled in his side right after. “But fuck you too, by the way. I was only trying to help you.

“But…” 

He bit his lip. Hesitated. _Monster_ , his mind reminded him as he angled his head enough to look at the kid’s face. His gaunt cheeks were smooshed against his arm, smearing more bright red blood on both of them. Sickly pale with dark, almost black veins prominent and visible where his skin was thinnest, trailing from around his eyes, down his cheeks, jaw, and neck. The fresh, bloody bruise where Clint had broken his nose already looked at least a few days old, and only served to make him look even younger. 

“Fuck,” he bit out with no small amount of bitterness. 

Gently, as much as possible, he reach out and pressed the palm of his hand against the back of the kid’s head. It was damp and sticky and entirely disgusting, but he didn’t move. Didn’t pull away. Not when the kid, even unconscious, leaned into the touch with a soft, almost inaudible whine. He groaned, cursed himself, and let the weight of his hand fall a little more firmly on the kid’s head. 

He stayed there for what felt like a small eternity, occupying himself with his muttering — most of it a stream of babbled nonsense — and making sure the kid wasn’t about to wake up and finish the job. He’d even managed to dredge up the energy to pry the kid’s teeth off his arm before wrapping it tight to try and staunch the flow of blood. It was sloppy and fast, and not ideal to do while lying on his back with another body on top, but he’d made do. 

He perked up however when he heard the faint scuff of boots further down the corridor, in the direction he and the kid had been headed before this mess. Muffling a groan, he leaned his weight on his uninjured arm, keeping the other firmly on the kid’s back so he didn’t slip. His bow was somewhere by his feet, knocked out his hands when the kid had knocked him down the first time, and the brief rest had done little but further deplete what little energy he had left. He’d fight if he had to, of course he would, but he hoped, for once, that luck was on his side the way it hadn’t been so far on this clusterfuck of a mission.

He tensed as the sound drew nearer, amplified and echoing in the silence. He counted twenty seconds before he saw a person-shaped shadow on the wall of the intersection up ahead, and briefly wished he could somehow see around the bend. He balled both hands into fists, boots squeaking over a wet patch on the floor as he pulled his legs in closer. The shadow paused. Waited. Clint’s traitorous body trembled in anticipation.

Avenger or HYDRA. 

Blonde hair and a red, white, and blue shield. Blue eyes and a familiar frame. Clint’s breath _whooshed_ out of him in one short, painful, and relieved gust. Steve paused, nose wrinkled and lips curled, eyes widening as he met the gruesome sight a few feet from them, before he promptly squared his shoulders and marched through the loose pile of bodies. The sight hit Clint like a blow to the stomach. A reminder that Steve had fought in — lived through — a gruesome war and had probably seen any number of things that would have had Clint diving for the nearest trash can. 

Not that Clint hadn’t seen some shit in his time, both before and after working with either SHIELD or the Avengers, but. But walking past — _through_ — the corpses of some 30 odd, brutalized people, enemy or not, was. Hardcore. Terrifying. Was there a word for it? For watching Captain America stride through a bloodbath towards him, confident and cool and with his brows drawn together like concern for Clint and the kid were the room’s main issue. 

Hardcorifying?

Awescary?

Unebelivablawesome? 

“I don’t think that’s a word.”

Clint blinked and watched the corridor tilt nauseatingly for a moment before it settled on Steve’s face, lips quirked in a small, wry grin, above him. _Oh_. He blinked again and grinned. He wondered if it looked as strained and tired on his face as it felt. 

“Hey, Cap.”

Steve huffed, a soft, wheezing laugh and said, “How are you feeling?”

“Like shit.” Another wheeze-laugh. “Got a bite on my arm, some nasty scratches on my neck, and something going on in my ribs. Kind of want to throw up too, but that might just be the, uh, smell.” 

Clint scrunched up his face as he said it, gratified when Steve nearly mimicked the expression. He watched Steve track over his injuries before his eyes settled on the kid. When he spoke, his voice was strained and his face had paled.  
“Is he…”

“Alive.” Steve’s shoulders slumped and some of the color rushed back to his face. “Looks worse than he is. He got shot at the beginning —” Steve jolted, hands reaching for the kid but ultimately paused before touching him — “but he heals fast. Must have stopped bleeding early in the… In the fight. Haven’t checked it properly since I can’t really get him off right now, but he doesn’t feel like a kid bleeding to death on top of me.” 

“Then the blood is—”

“Theirs,” Clint said and jerked his head to indicate the bodies behind Steve. 

“Christ.” 

Steve pressed the palm of his gloved hand against his mouth, brows furrowed as he scrubbed at some of the stubble on his cheeks and jaw. He looked worn, Clint noted knowing he looked no better. They’d been working on little to no rest for a week since they’d gotten the bizarre message that had prompted this mission. 

“Alright,” Steve said after a few seconds of uncomfortable silence. “Alright. We’ll deal with that later.” 

He looked between Clint, the kid, and the bend in the corner he’d come from, grimacing as he avoided looking at the floor as much as he could. When he came to a decision he nodded to himself, and stretched up to his full height. Clint lied back on the floor, biting back a moan as he pulled pressure off his arm and shoulder, and watched Steve press a finger to the comm in his ear out of the corner of his eye. Rather than listen in, he focused back on the kid still passed out on top of him.

A small furrow had formed between the kid’s brows at some point while his hands had crept closer to his body. One had managed to snag into his shirt, tucked in almost to his chin, and Clint hated the way his body tensed. It took effort and a few calming breaths until he’d forced himself to relax. The kid was a victim, he reminded himself. Probably. Most Likely. A killer, and dangerous, but a victim. 

Asleep like that, one hand fisted loosely in his shirt, he looked a lot like a kid having a nightmare. Clint tried to focus on that instead of the blood drying on his face and in his hair. 

“Alright,” said Steve, pulling Clint’s attention back. “Tony’ll be here soon to help. Natasha and Bruce,” he continued when Clint opened his mouth to ask, “are standing by, guarding the quinjet while Thor does another sweep of the base.”

Clint nodded, relieved. He felt the kid’s breath hitch, but kept his focus on Steve. *Kid, not monster*, he repeated in his head even as he spared a glance to make sure the kid hadn’t suddenly woken up. 

“I’ll go ahead and take him.” 

Clint jolted at the sound of Steve’s voice and, for the briefest moment he held the kid tighter. The reaction startled him, but there was no sign from Steve that he’d noticed it. Clint puffed out a shallow breath, careful not to jostle his ribs, and slowly peeled his hand off the kid’s back.

“Sure,” he said and it sounded strangled. 

Steve quirked a brow at him, but made quick work of scooping the kid up, mindful of both Clint’s wounds and the kid’s … everything. Clint wanted to say a half dozen things: _Careful. Don’t wake him. Watch your throat._ But settled on nothing. Steve moved back a few paces, looking almost casual as he leaned against the wall to wait for Tony. 

The kid looked even tinier in Steve’s arms, head lolling forward so his hair obscured most of his face and chest. Clint swallowed back a bitter pang of guilt and fear, and settled for shutting his eyes rather than staring at his teammate, the kid, or HYDRA’s annoyingly bright lights. It could have been five seconds or five hours since he’d shut his eyes, but once Tony arrived, things moved quickly. 

Clint let himself be half dragged, mostly carried, back to the Quinjet, proud he hadn’t gagged much as they’d passed the bodies. He all but lost track of the kid in the whirl of activity: Bruce taking the kid, Nat taking Clint, Steve at the controls and Tony not far behind. He must have fallen asleep at one point because between one blink and the next he’d found himself back at Avenger’s Tower, the medically dedicated fiftieth floor specifically, with a nurse unwinding the soaked bandage on his arm and another behind her. 

“Mornin’ Barb,” he said, mouth sticky and dry after having just woken up. The nurse, an aging older woman with her graying locs tied up into an elaborate bun, rolled her eyes but flashed him a quick, if strained, smile.

“It’s nearly nine at night Mr.Barton, and I thought I told you I didn’t want to see you back here for at least two weeks.”

Clint winced, shooting the nurse behind her a dirty look when they snickered, but didn’t even try to defend himself. He shrugged instead which earned him an unimpressed scowl and an annoyed cluck of Barb’s tongue. 

“’Least I get to see your beautiful face every time I’m here.” He paired the comment with a wink and a concerted effort to not stick his tongue out at the other nurse’s badly muffled laughter.

Barb didn’t miss a beat when she said, voice flat, “Too bad I’ve gotta look at your ugly mug.” The other nurse guffawed and Barb’s lips quirk up in the slightest of smiles.

“You wound me, Barb. Deeply,” he said, gesturing at his heart with the hand not being manhandled. 

“Good.” 

Clint huffed, smiling as well, and settled himself more firmly in the surprisingly comfortable hospital bed he’d woken up in. He let the silence stretch, comfortable if a bit heavy, as the nurses worked in tandem to clean and treat everything from his arm, neck, ribs, and even smaller scrapes he hadn’t noticed. He was relieved when only the bite needed stitches. Doubly so when the pair finished their work with an IV hooked into the catheter one of them had slipped into the back of his uninjured hand at some point. Barb placed two, clear, liquid-filled bags on the stand next to the bed before spinning to face him. She pinned him with a _look,_ lips pursed.

“You show up here again in under a week and I _will_ put you in a bubble,” she said, eyes alight in some mix of fond amusement and painful promise. 

Clint laughed, wincing when his chest twinged with pain, and nodded with a quick “Got it” slipping out between his teeth. He sobered up as she turned, stooping over a nearby table to write something down and Clint. Clint bit the inside of his cheek. He curled his fingers into the soft, thin sheets they’d draped over him once his ribs had been wrapped, and pulled them up a little higher. He stared at the shadows on the blanket where his knees were. Watched the fabric shift as he did. He bit down a little harder. 

He was tired. Exhausted still despite however-many-hours he’d slept between the HYDRA base and waking up with his arm in Barb’s hands. He wanted nothing more than to close his eyes and drift off, leaving the others to deal with the fallout. With the kid. But he had to know. Needed to know. Didn’t _want_ to know. He held his breath, counted to ten, and let it out in a rush. 

“Hey, Barb?” She hummed, not looking up from what she was doing, but paying attention nonetheless. Clint cursed himself and plowed forward. “The, uh.” He paused. Licked his lips. Barb stopped writing. “The kid. Did you…” 

He didn’t look up, didn’t so much as glance to the side, when he heard Barb’s sneakers scuff against the floor. She hovered somewhere at his side, silent until she put her hand on his shoulder. He swallowed, heard the door click shut as the other nurse left, but didn’t look up. 

“He woke up,” she said, serious. 

Clint froze, every muscle tense as his head spun — thoughts whirling through a half dozen different outcomes, each worse than the last. He opened his dry mouth, closed it. Tried and failed again. He jerked when Barb’s hand squeezed, grounding him back in reality. 

“He woke up,” she repeated, slow and carefully neutral, “And attacked the staff nearest him.” Clint’s breath hitched and his stomach churned. “No one was hurt too badly, and they had Mr. Rogers, Mr. Stark, and Ms. Romanov there to handle the situation. I heard there was a lot of yelling, but nothing worse than a black eye and torn lip.” He exhaled, leaning into the small comfort she offered.

“So he’s restrained then?” He’d asked it to clarify, but hadn’t expected the way Barb’s lips pressed into a thin, grim line, or the way her eyes darkened just a little.

“They didn’t have to,” she admitted. Her words were as slow and carefully strung together as before but heavier now. Sad. “One of the nurses told me the boy just … stopped fighting. No one’s sure why exactly, but it’s like he gave up all of a sudden.” Clint’s brows furrowed, but he didn’t speak, waiting for her to finish. “They’re keeping him cuffed to the bed for now, but Terry told me he hasn’t moved for a few hours. Won’t speak. Won’t eat. Poor thing just stares at the ceiling. They had to turn the lights off to make sure he doesn’t hurt himself looking at them like that.

“I haven’t gotten a look at him myself, but Terry’s not the only one mad at whatever it is those … those monsters did to that boy.” She looked down and away, then back at him with a sigh. “So far, they’re taking turns keeping an eye on him until he does something. Whether that’s sleeping, talking, or fighting again no one’s sure.”

Clint nodded and muttered a small, unenthusiastic “thanks.” Barb grimaced, squeezed his shoulder again, and left after dimming the lights. 

“Fuck,” he muttered, dragging his hand up to scrub roughly at his face. “Fuck.”

He rubbed at his eyes and tugged his hair, even kicked out once as the frustration bled down into his limbs like static, spurring him into limited motion. His energy, however, was limited and soon enough he settled back into the bed, doubly exhausted. He spent a few minutes staring up at the ceiling, mind blank until he shut his eyes, taking long, slow, measured draws of breath until his body relaxed into a not-quite peaceful sleep.

Nightmares lingered in the shadows and on the backs of his eyelids every day he spent in that room. The kid. The bodies. The blood. All of it woven together into some of the most bizarre series of nightmares he’d had in a long time. It wasn’t something he lingered on, instead focusing on the day-to-day minutiae: A few visits from Nat and the slowly healing shiner on her face, a few updates on the still-unresponsive but no longer restrained kid, the joy of a slice of pizza smuggled in. He was cleared to leave within the week, and, after a quick thank-you kiss on Barb’s cheek and a ducked swat to the back of his head in response, he’d all but fled back to his apartment a few floors further up in the tower. 

He spent that first day doing anything and everything he could to get his mind off of everything. Cleaning. Cooking. Video games. The second and third he spent up on the penthouse with whatever teammate wasn’t on duty watching the kid and willing to hang out. On the fourth, he caved to the pressure in his chest and that niggling sense of of guilt that had wormed its way steadily into his head since the day Barb told him to get the hell off her floor after making him promise he really would try not to be back for three weeks at least. It was an empty promise at best, and they both knew it. Clint, after all, was never that lucky. 

He visited the kid six times. They’d put him two floors down from the one their apartments were on, with extra cameras installed for better surveillance. He hadn’t made it into the room on the first visit that day. He’d stood in the doorway and watched the kid, clean and dressed in clothes too big for him, stare at empty space. His stomach had clenched at the sight, and he’d promptly turned on his heel, marched back to his apartment, and thrown up in the sink as the HYDRA corridor’s rank stench had flooded his nostrils. He’d slept that night with corpses stamped on the backs of his eyelids and the feeling that he was being watched. Studied. Hunted. 

The second time he tried, he managed to step into the room. It was a regular, blandly furnished living room with a couch and table at the center and a fireplace against the back wall, between two closed doors. The only high point were the floor-to-ceiling windows along one wall, but even those were common enough in the tower. The kid was sitting there, same as he’d been two days ago, staring blankly at the wall. Clint had looked at Steve, waited for _something_ , and got a shrug in return. He’d left not ten minutes later. 

The third time, Nat was there silent as a shadow and nowhere in sight. Clint swallowed, glad for at least the illusion of privacy, and walked all the way to the couch. The kid didn’t move. Hardly seemed to breathe. It was unsettling. Unnerving. Uncomfortable. Clint sat anyway, two feet between them on the long couch. He was silent for a while, breathing. Listening. Watching. Fifteen minutes into the visit, he opened his mouth and talked. He talked about anything and everything, same as he had back at the base with the kid knocked out on top of him and that awful odor in the air. He talked for twenty minutes when Nat melted into the room from whichever corner she’d hidden in, a few seconds before Bruce opened the door to relieve her. Clint followed her out, steps a little lighter and chest looser than they’d been the last two weeks.

His fourth and fifth visits passed similarly. He talked and the kid sat, silent and staring. He involved the other Avengers when they were there, drawing them into conversation as easy as pouring water in a cup. He stayed by the kid through each shift, leaving only when hunger or exhaustion prodded him into standing up from the corner of the couch he’d claimed.

On his sixth visit, the kid woke halfway through the day, coming alive in a way Clint hadn’t seen since they’d stood facing a row of armed guards. It started in the same room: the kid tense, skittish, but _talking_. Listening. Moving and alive and Clint almost didn’t realize how it loosened something inside him. His visit, his first lone shift watching over him, ended in the rain, on the tower’s rooftop terrace where the kid had sunk to his knees as he’d stared up at the gray, stormy, midday sky. There had been no tears, but his body had trembled violently in Clint’s arms. 

He didn’t think he’d ever forget the kid’s hoarse, broken whisper as he’d mumbled the same two incredulous words to himself over and over and over again:

_I’m Free_. 

Clint said nothing. His heart ached, a visceral reaction to the disbelieving desperation lacing the kid’s words. Like the kid could hardly believe the truth laid out before him, the same way he hadn’t believed Clint wasn’t trying to trick him. There was no warning whisper in his mind then, no sense of unease or the stomach churning nausea he’d felt even thinking of the kid. Instead, he ached. The cold wind and residual guilt bit at him, numbing his limbs and stealing his breath because—

He sucked in a shuddering breath and squeezed the kid’s shoulders, a brief warning before he pulled him a little closer. A little more firmly into the loose hold he’d held the kid in when his knees had buckled and Clint had worried the kid would fall on his face if he didn’t catch him. The kid gave in easily, sinking into the hold like putty in a kid’s hands. His now-healed nose bumped Clint’s shoulder, but not once did his eyes stray from the sky. Clint kept his gaze trained on the rain-slicked cement floor.

Neither of them moved for a long time.

**Author's Note:**

> Come chill out on [Tumblr](https://starculler.tumblr.com/) for status updates on this fic (or glimpses of others I'm working on)!
> 
> And yes, I did rip part of the title right off Spiderverse because it's amazing and reignited my need to make Clint an Uncle figure in this fic


End file.
